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Peter A. Mark

Professor emeritus of Art History, Wesleyan University

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

April 2024

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»The earliest West African responses to the Atlantic slave trade«

Project outline:

While historians and anthropologists have studied in detail both the origins of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Africans’ ritualized memory of that trade, the earliest responses to the slave trade by local communities in West Africa (Senegambia and Guiné) have hitherto been ignored. Contemporary eyewitness documentation exists, written by Portuguese and Luso-African merchants. My research, mining these written accounts, has uncovered the existence of the first communities of runaway slaves in West Africa. These proto-Maroon communities were established by the late 16th and early 17th century.
Several communities of escaped slaves were established, with at least the tacit support of local Africans. These maroon communities were composed in part or entirely of captives who had escaped from the Portuguese. During the late sixteenth century, fugitive slaves established villages where they were safe from recapture. In broad outline this was similar to maroon communities in Suriname and Jamaica, except that there was no need for a military force to protect against recapture. By the 1660s, these communities offered asylum only to slaves who had escaped from Europeans, suggesting the inception of an identity that transcended local ethnic groupings. Were there women among the escaped captives? Did asylum communities provide wives from among the local community? What was the motivation for leaders or elders in the host community? Was it to increase the numbers of their dependents? My research addresses these questions. (Peter A. Mark)

Research partner:

Peter Mark follows the invitation of Professor Roland Hardenberg at the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.

Scholarly profile of Peter A. Mark

Peter Mark is Professor emeritus of Art History at Wesleyan University. He has worked regularly at the Frobenius-Institut since 1984, both as Alexander-von-Humboldt-Fellow, and as Visiting Faculty Member. From 2015 to 2019 he was Invited Cathedratic Professor of History, at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris, 2019); at the Max-Planck-Institut (Halle, 2018). In 2012-2013 he was Senior Fellow at the research center »Re:work, Arbeit und Lebenslauf in Globalhistorische Perspektive« at Humboldt-Universität (Berlin).

Website:
Please find more information about Peter Mark here.

Main areas of research:

Cultural history of West Africa: pre-colonial history, art history, and 16th through 19th century European-African interaction, forms of captivity and unfree labor before the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade

Selected publications:

(ed. with José da Silva Horta and Carlos Almeida), African Ivories in the Atlantic World, 1400-1900 (Marfins Africans No Mundo Atlântico, 1400-1900), Centro de História da Universidade de Lisboa 2021.
(ed. with José da Silva Horta), The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World, Cambridge University Press 2011.
The Wild Bull and the Sacred Forst: Form, Meaning, and Change in Senegambian Initiation Masks, Cambridge University Press 1992.

Peter A. Mark

Scholarly profile of Peter A. Mark

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